Over the weekend, I had travelled down to join a panel of
media experts and film-makers at the annual "Bite the Mango" Bradford Film
Festival at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Our panel
hosted two seminars at the Festival, the first on 'Faith in Film',
and the other on 'Representation
of Muslims in Media'. I was invited at the last minute in a frantic
telephone call from one of the coordinators of the festival, and drove down
with my family on Friday so that I could arrive comfortably in time for the
Saturday morning workshops.
Among the issues I discussed in the Q & A sessions was
Home Secretary John Reid's face-off with
self-styled "radical cleric" Abu Izzadeen, where Reid took it upon
himself to warn Muslim parents to watch out for "signs" of their
children turning into dangerous extremists. Izzadeen's heckling diatribe in
response, was followed by more heckling diatribe from Anjem Choudray. Reid
pointed at the conduct of these two imbeciles as proof of his point.
In reality, the very fact that Izzadeen and Choudray are
free to run around heckling a British Minister is precisely the evidence that
disproves Reid's Islamophobic attempt to pin responsibility for
terrorist-extremism on Muslim parents.
Both these individuals are notorious extremists affiliated
to the proscribed al-Muhajiroun network linked to al-Qaeda and chaired by Omar
Bakri Mohammed, a network re-named as the Saved Sect and then Al-Ghurabaa.
Despite apparent proscription, the group's key members and activities operate
intact, quite unhindered. To date, the government refuses to arrest and
prosecute these individuals in spite of their repeated violations of British
law, including incitement to violence, racial hatred and terrorism, and in
particular despite their open admission of engaging in terrorist-training with
confessed intent to target Britain.
Consider Izadeen's statement a week after 9/11 cited on p.
77 of my book, The London
Bombings: "There are a sizeable number of Moslems undergoing
military training in the UK . . . If America decides to bomb Afghanistan, then
we'll wake up. If they're going to attack Afghanistan then what's my duty? It's
going to be a new chapter." The day after, his colleague Zahir Khan told
an al-Muhajiroun meeting in Birmingham that: "If Britain helped attack
Afghanistan, it would be allowable for Moslems to attack military targets in
Britain."
A Sunday Times investigation recorded Izzadeen's declaration
to a group of teenagers on 2nd July 2005, that it was imperative for Muslims to
�instill
terror into the hearts of the kuffar,� and indeed that: �I am a terrorist.
As a Muslim of course I am a terrorist.� Claiming to have engaged in military
training in Pakistan, he said he did not want to go to Allah while sleeping in
his bed �like an old woman.� Instead: �I want to be blown into pieces with my
hands in one place and my feet in another.� That was five days before the 7/7
atrocities.
Six months before the London terror strikes, Izzadeen's
mentor, Omar Bakri, had delivered a fatawa over the Internet urging British
Muslims to join a global al-Qaeda jihad. He explicitly described Britain as a
legitimate target, condoned the killing of civilians, and condemned the British
government's deployment of anti-terrorist legislation -- which had been used
not long before to arrest Bakri's close associate Abu Hamza, whose trial was
scheduled for 7th July 2005.
But the British government wasn't interested in
investigating Bakri. Instead they allowed him to travel to Lebanon, upon which
they debarred him from returning to the UK, and thus ensured that he is
permanently outside British jurisdiction. Meanwhile, Bakri himself -- who
continues to indoctrinate and guide a small circle of extremist fixers in the
UK -- boasts that he is regularly called in for questioning about
terror-related issues by the Lebanese on behalf of the British government -- a
matter on which the Foreign Office has "no comment".
And of course, Reid wouldn't want us to consider the role of
MI6 in the mid-1990s in actively using Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza and suspected 7/7
mastermind Haroon Rashid Aswat to recruit British Muslims to go fight in
Kosovo, as reported by multiple American and French intelligence sources cited
in the New Criminologist, and elsewhere. Reid's reluctance to take serious,
meaningful legal action against Bakri's boys, like Izadeen and Choudray, does
not square with his eagerness to blame Muslim parents for the same failure.
That was the thrust of my observations on this televised
debacle at the film festival.
We got back from Bradford on Sunday evening. I had forgotten
my mobile at home, and had a backlog of messages, one from my Dad, so I called
him back. He had very bad news.
My uncle in Bangladesh had been shot on
Saturday morning while I was speaking on my panel in Bradford. A
nationally-respected professor of political science at Dhaka University, Dr.
Aftab Ahmed, had been attacked in his own home on the university premises by
unidentified gun-men, who had pushed their way into the apartment and shot him
four times at close range in the upper body, in the presence of his wife (my
aunt) and 9-year old disabled daughter (my cousin).
This evening, at around 8 pm, my Dad called to let me know
that my uncle passed
away earlier this morning. He had been recently demoted from a
government-appointed post as Vice-Chancellor at Bangladesh's National
University. In that position, he had tackled entrenched issues of political
corruption and bribery, the legacy of the previous Allawi League government,
when hundreds of university staff had been systematically recruited solely for
their political support of the govt, as opposed to their merits as teachers. In
a politically explosive and unpopular move, he had fired all staff recruited on
the basis of corruption and moved to revitalize academic standards in
university recruitment.
This wasn't the first time my uncle had made enemies. He was
well-known as a Marxist dissident, and had often been imprisoned by previous
governments for his loud opposition and participation in demonstrations and
strikes. In 1995, he co-authored a powerful
critique of the lack of accountability Bangladesh's purportedly democratic
institutions, warning of "the intransigent attitude of the
bureaucracy" and highlighting "the lack of willingness and ability of
MPs to seriously enquire into government policies and operations."
In another notorious episode, my uncle had made a few
off-hand televised remarks suggesting the Bangladeshi national anthem be
amended for a new time, and to give new impetus to the people. He was harshly
criticized by hardline nationalists in a concerted campaign that almost lost
him his job. But such things never bothered him.
My uncle was a courageous academic who stuck by his
principles, and spoke what he believed. For unswervingly doing what he was
convinced was just, he was murdered in a brutal assassination, unprecedented in
the history of Bangladesh. As the world turns and the newsbites chatter, I pray
for uncle's soul, and hope that his legacy of political activism on behalf of
freedom and, always, against oppression and corruption, will be carried forward
in Bangladesh, this beleaguered icon of Third World devastation from which I am
descended. To those out there who believe, please pray with me.
� 2006 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (http://nafeez.blogspot.com) is the
author of "The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry "(London:
Duckworth 2006) and "The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the
Anatomy of Terrorism" (New York: Olive Branch 2006). He teaches
international relations, political theory and contemporary history at the
University of Sussex, Brighton.